Reading: "The City: London and the Global Power of Finance",
"Blindsight".
Me. Links.

What I'm ReadingThe City: London and the Global Power of Finance
by
Tony Norfield.
Book by a Marxist former City worker about how the city works.
He has a fairly traditionally Marxist perspective, citing Marx, Lenin
and some early 20th century Marxists like Rudolf Hilferding on the subject of finance.
In this view the City appropriates surplus value from workers worldwide
and distributes them to shareholders and its own workers. However in addition,
Norfield describes the City as having its own hegemonic power, which serves
"imperialist" interests in the UK as a whole. Developed nations have
better access to capital, can borrow at lower interest rates, can threaten
other nations with boycotts, are more secure and can exert power over weaker
nations this way.

Norfield attacks several ideas which he sees as fallacies. First, that the City is simply an extension of US power: he regards it as having its own distinct interests and points out cases of the UK government acting against US wishes. While smaller less powerful than the US, it's still one of the larger financial powers of the world having inherited Imperial advantages.

The second fallacy is that the interests of financial sector can be separated from "productive" sector. He points out that manufacturing and other firms use the the City extensively to raise finance, to launch takeovers, to hedge against risk and process payments. In his view the City cannot really be reigned in without getting rid of capitalism itself.

Norfield is more convincing in the first than the second. He largely ignores the specific
arguments usually made for the City acting against the interests of the wider economy.
For instance, by taking risks and then relying on bailouts if they fail, the city
extracts value as taxes from the non-financial sector: he doesn't try to calculate
whether this outweighs the imperial power it provides.

Others regard the City as
being a "resource curse" in the same way as oil discoveries can cripple a developing
economy. A valuable resource raises the value of the currency, meaning that the rest
of the economy's products and services become more expensive, crippling everything else.

Norfield sometimes seems to regard the UK governments careful pampering of the City as evidence
of the City's value, when it could also be a part-ideological, part-cynical nexus of interests
between politicians and financiers.

One of the best aspects of the book is the detailed economic history of UK finance.
In particular I liked the analysis of Churchill's return to the Gold Standard as being
in the conscious interests of the British Empire. While he's often regarded as just being
too ignorant of economics to understand that it would hurt UK citizens, he may have
regarded that as an acceptable price to defend the Empire. He cites Churchill's speech:

In our policy of returning to the gold standard we do not move alone. Indeed, I think we could not have afforded to remain stationary while so many others moved. The two greatest manufacturing countries in the world on either side of us, the United States and Germany, are in different ways either on or related to an international gold exchange. Sweden is on the gold exchange. Austria and Hungary are already based on gold, or on sterling, which is now the equivalent of gold. I have reason to know that Holland and the Dutch East Indies – very important factors in world finance – will act simultaneously with us today. As far as the British Empire is concerned – the self-governing Dominions – there will be complete unity of action. The Dominion of Canada is already on the gold standard. The Dominion of South Africa has given notice of her intention to revert to the old standard as from 1st July. I am authorised to inform the Committee that the Commonwealth of Australia, synchronising its action with ours, proposes from today to abolish the existing restrictions on the free export of gold, and that the Dominion of New Zealand will from today adopt the same course as ourselves in freely licensing the export of gold...

Thus over the wide area of the British Empire and over a very wide and important area of the world there, has been established at once one uniform standard of value to which all international transactions are related and can be referred. That standard may, of course, vary in itself from time to time, but the position of all the countries related to it will vary together, like ships in a harbour whose gangways are joined and who rise and fall together with the tide. I believe that the establishment of this great area of common arrangement will facilitate the revival of international trade and of inter-Imperial trade. Such a revival and such a foundation is important to all countries and to no country is it more important than to this island, whose population is larger than its agriculture or its industry can sustain, which is the centre of a wide Empire, and which, in spite of all its burdens, has still retained, if not the primacy, at any rate the central position, in the financial systems of the world.

Overall, quite interesting and a useful balance to the convenient assumptions that
the city can be easily divorced from the rest of the economy, but has too many gaps
to be really definititive.

What I'm Reading 2Blindsight
by Peter Watts. Hard science fiction novel about future humans making first contact
with aliens. It asks you to suspect a lot of disbelief, but is very rewarding if you do.
The science and ideas are top notch, and the book has a dark, tense atmosphere.
The author is apparently a marine biologist and the aliens are some of the most satisfyingly
alien and plausible I've ever read about.

Well worth reading, it seems to have become a bit of a classic.
Be aware that it has a grimdark tone and isn't exactly bubbling with optimism.

Me
Been feeling a bit down and lacking in energy. Doesn't seem to be
any particular reason for it, except maybe January blues.

Weight is still OK and I've been keeping up with the running though
it takes up a lot of my very limited free time.
Getting some personal bests again, seem to be over that plateau
thanks to a bit of hill work: did a few short hilly runs in my
lunchbreak at work.
The guys at work are mad keen
on running and vastly fitter than me. My personal best for 10km is a little under
57 minutes if I go flat out. Four of them went out for a little lunchtime jog
the other day, and the slowest of them did 10km in 52 minutes.

Kid had to go the dentist. Feel so sorry for him: he has a problem where
his tooth enamel is thin or missing, so he's prone to need fillings even
though he's really good about brushing and barely eats sweet things.
So he's really good but he has the same tooth problems as a brat who shoves
candy in his face all day and never brushes: it's so unfair for him.
I feel sad and guilty for him: feel I'm not able to give him the
kind of childhood I had.

The question is: what are you doing? The difference between 30 msecs latency and 300 msecs latency is mostly meaningless when editing text and of utmost importance in a first person shooter.---[ucblockhead is] useless and subhuman

A reasonably fast typist easily types 3 characters per second, so 300ms latency means you can't see what you're typing in real time. But in lots of apps latency seems to end up a few seconds, I often have to stop typing and wait for the words to appear, which is annoying. --It is unlikely that the good of a snail should reside in its shell: so is it likely that the good of a man should?

When you type, you aren't waiting for each character to appear before typing the next. You are sending a stream out your fingers and seeing a stream appear in front of your eyes. These streams are more out of sync than you realize as the latency of the human nervous system is itself pretty terrible. If you are typing quickly, you will generally take multiple keypresses before you notice that one in the sequence was incorrect.---[ucblockhead is] useless and subhuman

Doesn't keypress auto-repeat delay default to 250ms? I remember I used to bump it down. Long-press on my phone is only comfortable in the 150-200ms range. So 300ms is too high for my thumbs. On a real keyboard, I think I'd see benefit below 60ms, not sure how far below it matters.

30ms latency is at least 2 frames at 60fps. That's not too terrible (though you'd notice, and hate it) but since games process input by the next frame, it means you're running at 20-30fps depending on how you slice it. 20fps isn't cinematics, it's a slide-show, and 30fps is unacceptable for an FPS, even at 4k resolution.See you, space cowboy.

Anything online has additional latency that exceeds a 16 msecs, so you are already multiple frames behind. But anyway, yes, you want to minimize latency on your local hardware.

But given that most console games ran at 30 fps or worse prior to this generation, I don't think you can say "30fps is unacceptable for an FPS". Halo argues otherwise.

What I've seen is that a smooth 30 fps beats 40 fps where you have lots of random frame drops.

Auto-repeat delay isn't really relevant. You will only have a problem if your latency is highly variable. In any case, I believe in PCs, auto-repeat is at the hardware level, so all the software mucking about that causes the problems the article describes are not an issue.---[ucblockhead is] useless and subhuman

is usually measured locally, which is where the my 30fps comes from (as opposed to the 20ms.)

FPS on console "prior to this generation" has been hugely damned. And I don't know if you noticed the shitstorm that rolled in when people started supporting 4K at lower fps, but I have news for you: it's not okay. People are, by and large, not okay with it.

Halo's a great exception, but it's an insane example: the aiming correction is so extreme you're better off with a controller than a mouse, this is the experience of a PC gamer. Anyway: I played Halo at 60fps.

40fps with lumps in it is going to dip below the slide-show threshold, so duh?

Acceptable values for auto-repeat delay makes for empirical data on acceptable keyboard input latency. Too low and you'll trigger it sometimes while making a normal keypress. Too high and you'll be impatient waiting for it to kick in. Guess what? Standard delay values puts 300ms input latency in the "patently unacceptable" category, even for typing. So yeah, I guess that's "irrelevant" since it wasn't pulled out of your ass.

I mean shit, I was okay with made up numbers, I just like to obsess over the details. You wanna defend those precise numbers and throw out the actual evidence in the process, you have problems.See you, space cowboy.

If you've ever played a church organ, then it's the oddest thing compared to a piano. You press the key and a valve opens on some pipe round the back of the instrument, the sound bounces around the church and you hear it quite a bit later. The only way to play is to keep mashing at it and hope for the best.

But the delay varies. Some pipes will be quite close to you, others not.

I've only played one a couple of times. It's always one of those things where you think you can get one to it and bash out a mighty noise and sound cool. There's a lot more to it though. I'd like to learn properly but there's the time factor and the whole going to church bit.

I hear you can make some decent cash by lm (2.00 / 0) #23Sat Feb 03, 2018 at 04:46:43 PM EST

At least stateside. There are a declining number of people that can play a pipe organ well.There is no more degenerate kind of state than that in which the richest are supposed to be the best.Cicero, The Republic

that the city of London allows businesses to vote, giving them majority control of the council, and the the Queen is banned from entering without the Mayor’s permission. The City is anomalous in many ways. On a more personal level it is one of a few places that have a very unsettling “vibe”. Similar to Tintern. A feeling of very old (and not benign) power/magic. I can sense when I have crossed inti the city from outside it’s a little disquieting.

It has a noticably different vibe compared to by gmd (4.00 / 1) #17Tue Jan 30, 2018 at 03:24:18 AM EST

Canary Wharf, which also has a bad vibe. Canary Wharf’s vibe is pure greed and power, with a large helping of paranoia, whereas the City of London’s vibe seems more complicated, and perhaps more sinister. It has that quality of making me want to look over my shoulder, there’s a sense of being watched by malevolent entitie(s).
Or I could be mentally ill I guess.

Not just in the City of London. To clarify I am specifically talking about the “square mile”. The intensity of the bad vibes seems to coincide with proximity to certain buildings. The inns of court is one good example as is St Dunstan’s in the East and the area to the east of St Paul’s Cathedral. It would be interesting to know if any othe husi readers have noticed these wierd vibes...

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